Career Man
by rudy flamthrowa
Summary: So you thought you'd end up as a professor...Zombies and flying motorcycles.


**Career Man**

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by rudy

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I am watching for a flying motorbike.

It's my new morning commute.

Now, in essence, I am the same as a man waiting for a train in the London Underground- just instead of a tie, I sport a tail from time to time.

Allow me to explain.

It's not easy to plan a life, let alone a future occupation for oneself when the average life expectancy of someone with my particular ailment is never more than a year after their first shift. I beat out the average, thanks to the remaining fortunes of my parents and to my close encounters with lucky rabbits feet under the light of the full moon. After I had two newly grown lungs and a remodeled jawbone after my first transformation, I was just like the eight-year old I used to be, except of course for the terrific scar on my neck and chest and a few extra wolfish habits. I was one of the unlucky were-changelings during Voldermort's early reign that preyed upon the pity of others rather than mortal sweetbreads, shackled by a damning conscience and talent for being taken advantage of.

I felt the burden especially when I realized that I would have to continue my life as the tamer to an unlucky beast that lurked in my magical physicality. Guilt and shame stalked me like a lost lamb, especially as I grew older at Hogwarts and the word "career" began to buzz in my peers ears. When I looked at McGonagall, watching her nostrils twitch in the mimicry of a doubtful cat by the mere smell of my scruffy head in her office, I felt sorry that she had the misfortune of telling me that I wasn't likely to live past twenty-five, 'given my condition.' I rather liked her, twitchy noses and all, just because she favored James and Sirius so much that their antics usually distracted her from noticing how badly I fared in the magicks of her profession. With the added advantage of her flyaway pity for me, I skated over missed assignments and botched transfigurations, riding her blissful ignorance like a cool breeze.

I remember career counseling like a bad smell on a carpet rug.

With a gentle swirl of her index finger, a scroll of paper unwound itself from the massive scroll at the head of her desk and floated into my lap.

"This is a list of literature that you may want to be familiar with in order to consider your options. I have no doubt that you've seen some of these titles before."

At least she was speaking in my language. Books could tell me what she didn't want to- what she didn't understand, living as a person who was never satisfied with her individual body. Through a member of the feline persuasion, I supposed she was making her best attempt at earnest sympathy. Or at least was trying to communicate the same thing that I alone had been telling myself for years.

The lenses of her glasses mirrored the white glow of candlelight and shielded her eyes from my view. Her words were crisp and carefully annunciated, as if she were giving a lesson. A few strands had escaped from her plaited hair, and for a moment she looked out of place behind a desk, younger even than in Sirius's ridiculous, whispered fantasies about her. More human, and all the more beyond my understanding.

I allowed her spectacles, coated in that ghostlike, silver sheen, like the colorless retinal reflections of animals in the dark that I know so well, do most of the talking.

"There are organizations that help locate jobs for creature-folk in…friendly environments in spite of their violent predispositions. My boy, you must understand that those who dabble in the Dark Arts are wont to make promises they cannot keep. You will find no solutions there."

_Finding a job is going to be difficult than you could ever imagine._

"The Ministry department for the welfare of magical creatures such as yourself has pending legislation that may make finding employment easier for you by the time you graduate."

_You're going to be persecuted for the rest of your life._

"In the meantime, you may want to just focus on your education. I know you to be quite bookish Remus. It would do you well to polish up some of those grades of yours, and to avoid further mischief with Mr. Potter and Mr. Black."

_You're better off having fun in the meantime. It's not going to be easy._

"You're a smart boy, Remus. I think that you could go far."

_I'm sorry._

'No, Professor. _I'm_ sorry,' I'd say to her. Because even though your last words to me then made me grit my teeth and envelop the soft skin of the parchment into a clenched fist, you were the first one to offer a smidgen of hope for the wolf inside me who wanted to be put to work, taken advantage of, and forced to contribute to the tiny world that blasphemed its existence. Even if it was an idle remark. Even if you were a dirty cat. Even if you would take back what you said if you knew what exactly happened for the universe to give me an unexpected promotion from the equivalent of scum on the sink to the defender of Wizarding World.

"We'll find a use for you someday."

A warm breeze cuts through the salty air. I breathe in and my body burns with the sour pain of remodeling. I think of wheatie biscuits in the pantry.

I wouldn't be the first wizard to say it. The Dark Lord liked dead things too much.

He was ready to wage a war over magical eugenics, but he had the time to take pleasure from killing people and then having them scramble back to life again. If I really tried to consider his maniacal intentions, I would propose that he was more concerned with the process of resurrection, and how one could effectually create immortal beings—creatures that didn't need to feel the deterioration of their bodies, but could live ceaselessly. These included ghosts, vampires, fae, and even my own kind, who exhibit a sort of magical conservation of age, but no topic was subject to so much research as the dead themselves.

And when he learned how to raise the dead with his Inferi curses and brought the dementors on to his side along with the advantage of their dark and unknown cosmic sciences, the world changed for the worse. The evil he unleashed was not focused on one unlucky soul, or wizarding family with a muggle bloodline, but millions of them. These monsters were the real Death Eaters, the children of Voldermort whose loyalties lay only with their appetite for human flesh.

Charming, yes?

May sixteenth, 1985 was the day that the Death Eaters marched on, or more _accurately_, infested Diagon Alley. I can still hear Peter whispering around his chubby, clasped hands_they probably weren't marching, more stumbling, really... _He was just loud enough for his voice to carry over the frantic wizard radio broadcasts and the near constant state of panicked movement around the dormitory. The next day his mum called him home from school and he was killed on route by a pack of Eaters that had stowed in the cargo hold of the Hogwarts Express train. The whole swarm emptied out onto the nine and three-quarters platform and staggered through the enchanted doorway into muggle London. It was an ingenious tactical maneuver, to the Dark Lord's unvalued credit. Cruel, all the same, but he knew where to really concentrate his attacks, because this devastation communicated so much more than mere hatred.

He was accurate. Painfully so.

My friend James doesn't believe in accuracies. He says that there's no such thing as an absolute truth. When he used to say this aloud, usually in the presence of redheaded women, he spoke as if he weren't completely sure what he was talking about, and completely aware of it. His haughty smirk, hand-on-his-hip gesticulations, and the light of mischief that shimmered in his eyes brought forth a look from every person in the common room, but his own gaze stayed fixed on the crossed legs of Lily Evans—and as I learned later, how nicely her fair skin looked against the blue velvet cushion and how her hair was the color of the wrong end of a fire crab. He would gloat and show-off, raking his hands over his scalp and thrusting his chest into the air, while the world waited on baited breath for Evans to rise to his antics.

But the Potters were both loving and well-loved. At least James was kind enough to accompany me to the white cliffs of Dover to exterminate a ranched horde overnight. Neither of us would ever forget the image of several thousand writhing, grey masses herded by wizards on airborne thestrals, the flashes of green light from their wands doing nothing to keep the bodies from reaching out to touch the mottled hooves of the skeletal horses. Nor would we ever forget the silhouette of Albus Dumbledore perched on the back of a hippogriff against the twilit, apricot sky, his elegant hand raised to his brow, tipping his cowboy hat in our direction. Not really looking at me, James mildly asks if I wanted to borrow his coat for the night.

"Sirius left his leather jacket with me one time and was surprised when I returned the remains of it in a MacDonalds bag," I shot back at him, fumbling with the buttons of my shirt. Cursing my fingers, I wrestled the shirt over my shoulders, but by the time my head was free, Dumbledore had risen with the others, the sky turned sallow by the sinking of the sun. I tossed my shirt to James, and eventually my boots and pants, covering myself with a threadbare robe of that belonged to Mr. Potter senior. Following Dumbledore's example, the thestral riders holstered their wands and pulled away from the horde's rotting, outstretched arms, the volume of rasping moans and wails rising like a tidal wave.

"With a side of zombie slaw and a coke?" James quipped, balling the clothes under one arm and leaning back like a feisty housewife.

"You're disgusting."

"Hex me." He called out, laughing into the fists of his hands as he pressed them to his chapped lips and probably imagined how he'd wet them later on his Lily's neck. Potters don't keep many secrets to their body language. Not like us Lupin's and Black's who are entirely hard to read. Especially on nights of the full moon, or as Sirius so aptly chose to refer to them as, 'eves of destruction and sick laundry.'

As if he felt the downpour of agitation fill my senses, short, shivering Potter clasped his hand on the back of my neck, heavy and firm, almost as if he were trying to pull himself up to my height. Perhaps in an attempt to look over the white cliffs in front of us and imagine himself a little bit bigger in their wake, and suppose my own. I couldn't help but be tall as well as dark and beastly, as it was.

James smiled and his hand remained an affectionate, constant presence as we watched the sun's color sink like a dying wick into wax and thick plumes of indigo clouds seep into the darkening sky. From his side I could see the edge of a tooth and the premonitions of jokes about Macbeth and witches on his wicked tongue.

"Go home to Lily. "

"And you to your business." He inclined his head, drawing his wire-framed spectacles down the length of his nose and looked at me with hazel eyes as warm as the froth on a butter beer. A quirk of the lips and he was gone— apperated to his kitchen Godric's Hollow, where, no doubt, Lily was brewing new batches of Wolfsbane and weaving charms into fishbowls and flowers as she toiled by the hearth.

My business, he called it. I looked down at the dull, wool robe that was tied loosely at my hips, and at once could hear in my head Siruis having a laugh over proper work attire.

Proper attire.

The change is quicker than I remember, made easier by time. The wolf in me is always hungry and eager to take the heads and limbs off the walking dead so they are less mobile and proper dead. Being denied fresh flesh also makes me especially vicious on a rough night of near constant offense. But not matter the number of Inferi, they couldn't stand up to the wolf, not when he feels rage in the most potent, animalistic form. My curse was the antidote for a virus that couldn't afford to spread. It is still strange that becoming one with the beast inside of me is capable of any amount of good for the existence of world around me. As I became more familiar with the things I could accomplish for my fellow wizards, the world brightened, even through my colorblind eyes, and the colors that I never saw before with the eyes of a monster became clear to me.

Dead and dying grays versus life and living color.

I am still waiting for a flying motorbike.

More importantly, I am watching for a flying motorbike to putter out of the butter-cream horizon, pealing out of the periwinkle remnants of the night as it's washed away by the sun. Somewhere on the frothy edge of the sky, Sirius would appear, and the rumbling thrusts of his motorbike's engine would echo across the cobalt sea and to the shore. He would arrive to ferry me homewards, to a cup of chamomile and a warm bed where I can sleep away the daytime. He would come with a bar of chocolate, a flask of Odgin's and an extra helmet—more like an oversized, hollowed out snitch with chin-straps. He would smile, spraying a fan of mud in my direction as he landed his steel chariot on the muddied grass, and then, the sun would leap into the cerulean sky, as if he were Apollo in the flesh heaving the great ball of fire behind him and up into the sherbet pallet of the dawn.

I'm still waiting for him to shoot through the clouds, but I can afford to wait. Perks like a mud bath at five-thirty in the morning, a lukewarm cuppa and no biscuits left in the pantry compare to nothing else I could ever desire.

What else can I say? It's my job.

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End file.
